Deja Vu

Boyse Mosley, Northwestern High School principal, made some scathing -- and surprising -- comments last week about his boss, Superintendent Richard C. Hunter. In an interview, Mosley, whose name has surfaced as a possible mayoral candidate next year, sharply criticized Mayor Schmoke for not firing Hunter, whom Mosley derided as "just a public relations man." Mosley went on to compare the city schools to a sinking ship, and Schmoke and Hunter to vacillating captains unable to make up their minds whether to lower the lifeboats.

Fifty years ago, Harry Truman wrote an article in the Washington Post expressing his disappointment over what the Central Intelligence Agency had become. He had established the CIA in 1947 to provide his office with objective information. But it had since "been diverted from its original assignment," Truman wrote, and "become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government ... injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. " He wanted the CIA to be restored to its original intelligence function and asked "that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

There are any number of ways to view last week's raucous City Council committee meeting, where by a 3-0 vote, members approved a $107 million public financing deal for the Harbor Point development. It was theater, for sure, with drama and high dudgeon preceding the vote. And it was business as usual, since exactly no one expected the taxation committee to buck the mayor and other powerful interests pushing for development of the city's last big harborfront site. But for Marc V. Levine, it was another chapter in the book he's been threatening to write for years, chronicling what he calls the Baltimore urban development model.

There are any number of ways to view last week's raucous City Council committee meeting, where by a 3-0 vote, members approved a $107 million public financing deal for the Harbor Point development. It was theater, for sure, with drama and high dudgeon preceding the vote. And it was business as usual, since exactly no one expected the taxation committee to buck the mayor and other powerful interests pushing for development of the city's last big harborfront site. But for Marc V. Levine, it was another chapter in the book he's been threatening to write for years, chronicling what he calls the Baltimore urban development model.

Hearing of Annapolis Mayor Alfred A. Hopkins' plan to renovate the City Dock causes an uneasy feeling of deja vu.The $10 million project to repair the dock's pavement, bury power lines and shore up the bulkheading is being presented with many of the same glowing promises that presaged the reconstruction of Main Street in the state capital a few years ago.Although the Main Street project had been talked about for years, when it came down to getting the...

Lee Minto lives a continent away, but the news she hears from Maryland these days has an eerie ring. Yogi Berra would call it "deja vu all over again."A year ago, Ms. Minto was chair of a Washington state coalition working for approval of an abortion law much like the one Marylanders will approve or reject on Tuesday.Like Maryland, Washington has been considered a strongly pro-choice state, where the majority of voters wouldn't dream of returning to an era in which abortions were severely restricted.

THIS IS one of those times when it seems America has been locked in a time machine and hurtled back to the early 1970s.There's enough deja vu with 500,000 U.S. troops in another distant war. Echoes of 20 years ago are haunting: Fleets of bombers, grisly TV pictures, cheerful generals, no certain end.But now comes more bizarre evidence it's 1972 all over again: George McGovern is threatening to run for president.The gulf war will run its inexorable course. But please, spare us a melancholy trip down memory lane with George McGovern.

What a difference four years doesn't make. Maybe it's a natural offshoot of the state's having two alpha personalities, Martin O'Malley and Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., with a long shared history and equally long memories. But when these two get together, there's always this sense of unfinished business, of old scores to be settled. On Monday, they took to a WJZ Channel 13 studio for the first gubernatorial debate of this election, but, like old generals, somehow found themselves re-fighting their last campaign.

It's time for Baltimore County school officials and government leaders to commence their annual tug-of-war over the local school budget. School Superintendent Stuart Dubel has submitted to County Executive Roger Ruppersberger a proposal . .Check that. We meant School Superintendent Bob Berger and County Executive Dutch Rasmussen.Still not right? You'll have to excuse our confusing the players from the most recent budget tussles. The names are practically interchangeable, given how the same thing tends to happen each year.

In Henry Jaglom's "Deja Vu," love is more than a sense of familiarity. It's pure, electric destiny.The film is dreamy and delicious in ways romantic movies rarely are, as it tells the story of a man and a woman, each deeply involved in a relationship, who find themselves inexplicably and mystically drawn to each other.Victoria Hoyt, who was so appealing and mercurial as the Hollywood actress in husband Jaglom's "Last Summer in the Hamptons," plays Dana, who meets a sad, radiant older woman on a business trip to Israel.

For those who missed it, President Barack Obama turned his attention to the U.S. economy this week in speeches where he renewed his commitment to green energy, boosting manufacturing, and spending more on infrastructure like roads and bridges; chastised Republicans for political gridlock; and reached out to the still-hurting middle class. While these were familiar White House themes and many are quite popular with voters, the "major" policy announcements drew a ho-hum response that may have resonated no farther from Galesburg, Ill. (the site of one speech)

This Howard County movie has played before: the County Council considering laws to restrict rural land development, farmers staging a tractor parade protesting what they see as an attack on their property values, public officials saying preservation efforts would only push landowners into the arms of developers. Scenes from farmland development fights of 1985 and 1988 have unfolded again lately, albeit with fewer tractors in the parade, fewer farmers in the dispute and about half as much farmland to argue about.

So we're told by Len at the top of the show that the stars will be coordinating "every little detail. " I'm really hoping that doesn't mean they're doing choreography. Brooke promies us "two bombshell announcements. " Staircase entrances - Sabrina is wearing a dinner napkin that barely comes past her girlybits and Peta's just flat-out gone for lingerie in a see-through teddy and stockings. And Maksim has on a hideous, hideous wig. Oh, and it looks like Bristol can see Russia in her dance partner?

From the Sun's archives: This time last year remnants of Tropical Storm Lee were playing havoc with the Orioles and Yankees. Both teams were getting water logged. The Orioles had started a three-game series at Yankee stadium on a steamy Sept. 5, losing 11-10. On Sept. 6, Yankees won 5-3 after a 4-hour rain delay. Sept. 7, the Orioles triumphed 5-4 after playing 11 innings on a soggy day in the Bronx. They returned to Camden Yards on Sept. 8 to play the Yankees in a make-up game from Aug. 27 that was canceled by Hurricane Irene.

For a few hours on Wednesday, Annapolis took a time warp back to 2005. The Senate badly wanted an expansion of gambling, and the governor was on its side. The House of Delegates, facing internal and external pressure to do something on an issue that had consumed the State House for years, agreed to a plan but on terms that its leaders knew nobody involved was willing to accept, and the whole exercise collapsed in a jumble of finger-pointing. If anybody can feel good about the failure this week of the special work group to consider gambling expansion, it's Republican former Gov.Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. He was on the losing side of the 2005 gambling fight, and at least he can now take solace that it wasn't just him; Democratic Gov.Martin O'Malley wasn't able to seal the deal in 2012 either.

What a difference four years doesn't make. Maybe it's a natural offshoot of the state's having two alpha personalities, Martin O'Malley and Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., with a long shared history and equally long memories. But when these two get together, there's always this sense of unfinished business, of old scores to be settled. On Monday, they took to a WJZ Channel 13 studio for the first gubernatorial debate of this election, but, like old generals, somehow found themselves re-fighting their last campaign.

Deja Vu is a misnomer. This elaborate, action-packed thriller centers on a cutting-edge FBI surveillance unit that enlists ATF agent Denzel Washington to solve the bombing of a jammed New Orleans ferry. The film is tense and engrossing. But it lacks exactly what the title advertises: the sense of inexplicable familiarity that should haunt you as the story unfolds and leave you all a-tingle when it ends. Deja vu (Touchstone) Starring Denzel Washington, Paula Patton, Jim Caviezel, Val Kilmer, Adam Goldberg.

When Cardinal Gibbons High School junior Kanu Aja spotted a group of officials from the Archdiocese of Baltimore touring the campus this year, he assumed the worst. "They did the same thing at Towson Catholic last year," said Aja, 18, of Finksburg. "They walked through the whole school and talked and then shut down the school. "I had a gut feeling that something bad would happen here." Aja was one of four Towson Catholic underclassmen who wound up at Gibbons last fall.

T he decision of former governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. to seek his old job has reminded this Maryland historian of an election from six decades ago. In 1950, former Baltimore mayor Theodore R. McKeldin defeated incumbent governor William Preston Lane Jr. in an election whose political climate bears some similarity to that in 2010. First, there was voter anger. Governor Lane had pushed through the General Assembly the first sales tax in Maryland's history. State residents took out their frustration on Mr. Lane first by nearly nominating his Democratic Party primary rival George P. Mahoney - whom the governor removed from the Maryland Racing Commission.